The long-awaited meeting between the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and the Sports Ministry finally happened, but neither emerged happy from six-hour discussion between a handful of ministry officials, 40 national federation bosses and IOA officials.The worst part of the meeting was that Sports Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar himself was absent. His secretary SK Arora explained the minister’s absence in one sentence — the minister has been in meetings before too, and today’s meeting was no different.However, Arora said he has received various suggestions from the parties concerned, and he will place them before the minister for a decision. IOA chief Suresh Kalmadi, too, had his one-liner to sum up the meeting and the revised sports policy: “A disguise we totally reject.” The IOA, he said, had given a set of dates between January 20 and February 10 when all the parties concerned could meet to sort out the issues relating to the sports policy. “It was decided to meet today, and we were eager to put forth our viewpoints. But I don’t know why the minister couldn’t make it,” said Kalmadi.On the objections in the revised policy, Kalmadi said though the ministry had removed the regulatory authority clause from the draft policy, it has introduced it in five other places of the revised draft in disguise. “This is not acceptable. And we don’t see any reason for harping on the Concurrent List as well, when it was not passed by the Rajya Sabha several years ago,” he said.Kalmadi said that the ministry was not doing enough to help federations prepare their teams for the various Games — the Beijing Olympics, Pune Commonwealth Youth Games and the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. He said time was wasted on things like the Concurrent List, instead.“We have told the secretary (Arora) not to blame us (federations and IOA) if we are not able to win medals in these Games. I would want the ministry and the Sports Authority of India to concentrate on training the athletes, which is far more important at this juncture than anything else. We can always continue the dialogue on the sports policy. In fact, the ministry could go back on the 2001 policy to draw several things from it,” he concluded.
